Simple Toolkit Abstraction
Nitin Chadas SimpleUI project for rendering a subset of XForms was written from
ground up and provides now backends for FLTK, Gtk and Qt. It needs a bit
of polishing to become useable.

Thanks to Google for providing the colour management and graphics community again a great chance to code and learn the open source way.

In begin of May there was the 7th LibreGraphicsMeeting in Vienna and Oyranos participated also this year in this meeting of nearly all free/open source graphic software. Oyranos had two talks there and I already blogged the impressions. Now the most of the videos from the talks are online.

During the recent days I improved the file dialog preview of ICC Examin. As a result I created a new Oyranos tool called oyranos-profile-graph, which can be found in git. It provides a simple icon and can potentially be used in tools like Synnefo or KolorManager‘s info tab.

There exist some graphing tools like ppmcie to generate a nice triangle inside a CIE*xy horse shoe.

CIE*xy graph from ppmcie

But as ICC Examin sticks on CIE*Lab, I think it is more appropriate to use the CIE*a*b projection instead. Both are available by oyranos-profile-graph. The graphical output of the tool is really simple, beside using Cairo for antialiased curves. Below are the 2D graphs for sRGB.icc LStar-RGB.icc ProPhoto-RGB.icc ISOcoated_v2_bas.ICC ISOuncoatedyellowish_bas.ICC profiles. The first graph is CIE*ab and the second shows the same saturation lines in CIE*xy.

Sirko brought up the idea to organise a hackfest together with developers of applications for Linux desktops and experts interested in colour management. The idea behind that event was to bring interested developers together, support them in implementing color management in their software and move forward that topic across desktops and distributions.

During the recent LGM we found a chance to involve Richard Hughes and planed together about what we like to do during the hackfest. We spotted three main areas of interest: desktop applications including window managers, web browsers and printing. These topics are already worked on, but in a scattered way.

As example, Gwenview is a really great application for managing pictures. But it has no color management implemented yet. Color management in KWin is worked on during the GSoC this year, but in the opposite color management in the compositing manager mutter on the GNOME side is far away as can be read here. Not many web browsers support color management and if they who do, it is often incomplete. The SVG v2 standard will for example introduce additional color management features compared to SVG v1. So it is now the right time to get these implemented in order to be well prepared. For the KDE printing stack there is also a GSoC project this year, but also the Linux Foundation has a working group for this topic.

So, by meeting in person in one place, we want to get something done and build a good understanding of the role of each participating group for a working end to end colour management.

The hackfest will very likely happen in Brno in the Czech Republic at the Red Hat offices. A good time appears later this year 16th till 19th November. Now we like to collect more ideas, speak to people and sort financial issues.

The Technikum Wien provided a nice place and great support for the LibreGraphicsMeeting. Many thanks to them. LGM happened together with the Linuxwochen Wien and developers and users could talk about graphics and arts themes. Additionally to the one presentation track over all days, we had BoF’s and workshops. Some of us took the chance to present to a non LGM audience and meet people there too.

The LGM talks covered lots of OpenCL projects. That means modern GPU computing power is available to open source graphics components in a much broader way. As the use of OpenCL is supported by the Mesa software implementation, there is some kind of guarantee, that OpenCL programs will run on elder hardware. That means OpenCL can be used without the need for developers to provide a fallback mechanism, which simplifies adoption.

The colour management talks provided lively discussions around many topics like printing, displaying and open hardware. We discussed as well the impact of introducing colour management in frameworks like GEGL. As mizmo showed interest, I explained the most basic terms of ICC rendering intents in a small BoF using ICC Examin. Animtim compiled and installed Oyranos from sources and wrote already a small tutorial on how to build Oyranos on kubuntu-12.04.

Markus Raab presenting Elektra on LGM 2012 Vienna

The presentation of Markus Raab about the Elektra configuration gave to me some impressive insights into the concepts and flexibility of that small framework. The really cool thing about this library is it can abstract a lot of details and provide additional features, which can be added on run time like DBus support. He announced a new release of Elektra as version 0.8.0 during the event.

The metalab was for most people from countries without a similar open hardware/open source collaboration zone a impressive visit. We all enjoyed to could stay there for some hours and felt, this place is much in the spirit of most LGM contributors.

Nathan Willis @ LGM 2012 Vienna

During Nathan Willis workshop about the Create wiki, we discussed to start a email list for create users. That list is supposed to provide help and talk about experiences with graphics applications and help from users for users.

Sirko (alias gnokii) and Tobias (alias houz) played diplomat and managed to channel information in a way that Richard Hughes and I could finally meet in a productive atmosphere and continued talking about technical issues. At the end we found a mod to work again together on standards inside the OpenICC collaboration project. I am pretty happy with that change. So, thanks to all parties who helped with that.

Café Hawelka Vienna

Tatica, Pete, Sirko and I walked around on the last day in Vienna and relaxed in the café above.

OpenICC obtained three project slots for the Google Summer of Code 2012
stipends. That means three students can work again this year full time over
three summer months on colour management projects. Thanks to Google for
organising and sponsoring the program.

Chemnitzer Linux-Tage was this year again a great event. The mainly german speaking visitors enjoyed a well organised fair of mixed open source community and business booths, talks and workshops.

On the Oyranos project booth discussed old friends various colour management topics and concepts. We felt that colour management terms and concepts inside the open source community are behind the awareness of other comparable graphic techniques like for instance font rendering. The more I find it amazing, that there is a core of users, which try hard to understand ICC techniques.

One topic with neighboring openSUSE people was of course the strong rose awareness around colour management during the recent discussions on the KDE core-devel list. What I found encouraging is, many people inside the KDE community see it important to collaborate. And so I think we in the OpenICC community should accelerate on our formal recommendation efforts for sharing colour data and configurations. An other related point was made, that it would be not helpful to stall projects in a too long wait for constructive discussions to come to live. I tried this sometimes and see now that balance between discussion and start for actual work could be improved. Good to get so many feedback about OpenICC core stuff in great face to face discussions.

With openSUSE’es Tom I discussed his improvements on the new open build service (OBS) search page layout, which is a great ongoing work. But much to my surprise he could point me to a nice and long wanted OBS feature, which I now integrated into the Oyranosdownloadpages. That is, OBS provides embeddable download instructions for each distribution package of a project. These easy instructions show end users, how to install the desired software including all dependencies from OBS. Thanks for this valuable hint, which makes our colour management packages in OBS much more accessible to our users.

Looking around I found the mageia distribution interesting and would find it great to see this distribution integrated into OBS once a successful version 2 comes out this spring. But of course there are other interesting distributions out there to integrate into OBS. One advantage of OBS for me as a maintainer is as well, that I can test my packages prior to release in one go.

On the FFmpeg booth we discussed the idea that 3D lookup textures are a very simple way of exchanging colour transforms. I will surely look deeper into this and want to find a useful format to exchange 3D shader data for OpenGL textures. In CompICC a 16-bit PPM image helped for debugging. Lets see if we can find a more common and useful format to reuse.

As mentioned in a post before, the Libre Graphics Meeting will be held in Vienna from 2th until 5th of May this 2012. I have now submitted my talks and will hopefully know in some days if they are accepted.

Colour Management a la Greek: will give a overview about some technical concepts for platform independent color management systems.Evolving Concepts for Colour Management: will summarise the ongoing ideas and discussions on the freedesktop working group OpenICC.

Sirko submitted Taxi DB – Call A Cab To Bring The Colors: which describes the idea behind the ICC profile database and hopefully we getting some feedback and ideas, on how to make sure, that the quality of the profiles will be high.

If we can get to useful work on specs on a OpenICC round table for the sake of cross desktop compatibility, then even better.

Not directly related to colour management but nonetheless interesting, I was pointed to a project called Tupi. Tupi was forked by Gustav Gonzalez from KToon. KToon made no noticeable progress since he left the project in 2010.

Gustav likes to attend the Libre Graphics Meeting, but he needs some support to get there. We should help him, so that he can meet Boudewijn Rempt and some others from Krita, who can help him to find his way to the KDE community. But he needs some money for travelling. And there are still some other requests for generosity I mentioned before.

Tupi

Libre Graphics Meeting

Tatica

Libre Graphics Meeting (LGM) is coming along nicely and will surely become again a cool event for the FLOSS community. LGM is this year co-located with the Linuxwochen Vienna and their Call for Papers is still open until 1st of April.